Passing through, sometimes happy, sometimes blue

I have left Pau yesterday. The autumn weather has been cold and wet lately and the mountains were already snowclad when I left my empty apartment.

After over three years in charge of the administration of subsidy requests from local farmers, I have seized a new job opportunity.

From my time in the Southwest of France, I will particularly miss: 

My parents' country house only 1 hour and 40 minutes' drive away. It was particularly easy to pop over for the weekend and enjoy their company, my mother's home-cooked food and the ocean nearby.

The farmers' market in Pau and all its delicious fresh food at very competitive producer prices.

The Pyrenees mountains just one hour away. In winter I could be on the ski slopes in just over an hour from leaving home. In all other seasons I wandered through the network of footpaths crossing only a few human beings, but lots of free-grazing cows and sheep. I might even have been spied upon by a lone wild wolf on the Rey mountain one August day in 2019. Overall, I managed never to come back on a path I had already walked on during these past three years. Walking through the hills and mountains has been a rejuvenating experience, especially for my mind - very often absorbed by my job's responsibilities.

I start my new job tomorrow teleworking from my parents' country house while I wait for a visa and a plane ticket to reach my next destination...

Passing through

Leonard Cohen, Live songs, Columbia

They gotta be the luckiest dreamers who never quit dreamin'

Three years ago I wrote a post about my friends Margot and Christophe starting a sheep and vegetable farm in the middle of the Southern Alps. Having become a co-owner of the land they were using to let their sheep graze in the mountains, I had been feeling very guilty that I had not managed to go visit them for the yearly summer co-owners' meeting and lamb barbequeue. I was starting to fear that my friends and the other co-owners would start thinking I was a selfish and absent landowner, uninterested by the lives of the farmers on this bit of land I co-owned. So this year I hired a car and drove across France from the Pyrenees mountains into the Alps through the Cévennes, Lozère and Ardèche mountains in the centre of the country.

It was a beautiful road trip. I really enjoyed driving through the narrow windswept country and mountain roads. The landscape changed along the way East from agricultural fields to chestnut forests, pine and fir trees, and finally heather moorland just below the Mont Lozère. After dropping down into the Rhone Valley, I climbed back up into the Alps on the other side to enter lush valleys where farmers were growing the fodder their animals would need in the winter.

In Glandage, although the paperwork for our co-ownership land association has still not been finished, the association has already bought the land with the monies we all invested. Margot and Christophe have thus expanded their farm: 0.8 ha give organic vegetables. They supply local villagers, their children's school canteen and an organic shop in the main town of the valley. Thanks to the land all their friends co-invested in, they now have 70 ewes (three got killed by wolves just ten days ago!), which give birth to one or two lambs every winter. Likewise, the meat is sold in local marketing and processing networks. Margot also harvests the wool, which is of good enough quality to be processed into clothing yarn.

My friends' agricultural project is essentially of a social nature. They wish to make the most of their social and direct marketing networks to sell off their produce. But they seem to be fulfilled, very busy and, now in their third year, they can actually make a small monthly revenue to spend on something else than just the farm or the essentials to feed and nurture five lovely and lively children! Their plans for the farm still include finishing off the paperwork for our land association...

But, they are much more excited by the possibility of clearing the trees from the mountainous pasture land to open up more land to grass, and using the funds left over to buy another smaller plot of land closer to their house where they could have the sheep graze in the spring. Finally, another young couple from Switzerland has moved into the neighbouring house and would like to join Margot and Christophe's farm business to improve the vegetables' productivity and possibly open a small processing enterprise to add value to the produce.

I am keen to see how all this will develop in the coming years.

As long as we got each other (theme from Growing Pains)
B.J. Thomas, Midnight minute, Warner Bros/Wea

From Orient are

Happy 2016 to all! One day after Epiphany, here's a short story from the East.

It is an illustration of the base-of-the-pyramid business concept. Or how a large private animal feed supplier is doing business with smallholder pig farmers in Vietnam, and how the bigger more powerful firm has to adapt to the structure and production conditions of the smaller farmers.

This is the last blog post I wrote while at ILRI last Summer. It took some time to get cleared by the private-sector partner and then published here.

We three kings
Traditional Christmas carol, The beach boys, The beach boys' Christmas album, Capitol records

Photo: ILRI/Kat Orbizo

Tell me more, tell me more, did she put up a fight?

Where goats produce numbers and tell stories about women to statisticians.

Intrigued? Read more here.

Summer nights
John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Soundtrack from the original motion picture Grease, Paramount

Photo: ILRI/Mann

Find out what's going on there

Read about three different models of linking small dairy farmers to the vast milk market in Kenya here.

Sour milk sea
George Harrison, Jackie Lomax and various celebrities, Come and get it: the best of Apple records

Photo: ILRI

What do I do?

Read here about how agricultural economists can identify the complicated trade-offs faced by smallholder farmers in Uganda when deciding whether to join potentially lucrative marketing chains.

So complicated
Anna Graceman, track single available online

Photo: ILRI/Jo Cadilhon

And this little piggy stayed home - NOT

Read here how boring numbers translate into interesting findings about the leanness of Vietnamese pig value chains. It looks like farmers are not being exploited by traders in this very dynamic market.

This little piggy
Rasputina, Lost & Found, Instinct Records

Photo: ILRI/Simone Retif

Milk and coffee

Read here how I travelled from Tanzania to Nicaragua to find the raw inputs for my café au lait, supervising young researchers studying innovation platforms along the way.

Milk and coffee
Gumi

Photo: ILRI/Susan Macmillan

If you invest your tuppence... you'll be part of plantations of ripening tea, tanneries!

Discover the linkages between finance and the livestock industry in developing countries by clicking here.

Fidelity Fiduciary Bank
From the original soundtrack of the film Mary Poppins, Walt Disney Video

Photo: ILRI

I'll state my case, of which I'm certain

Two weeks ago I went to a conference in Cape Town to present some of the work I do on identifying African success stories of agrifood marketing chains that are inclusive of smallholder farmers.

I was put on the spot there by an unexpected question in a plenary session of the conference. Not satisfied with the response I gave, I had the opportunity to think more about it during my solo ascension of Table Mountain: 2 hours up from the city side, 20 minutes sandwich lunch break on the summit with the two-oceans view from Maclear's Beacon and 3 hours down into the Kirstenbosch botanical gardens.

The result: read about why I have gone into agriculture and agribusiness here.

My way
Frank Sinatra, My way the best of Frank Sinatra, Reprise

It's so warm here and this heat gets me down

Read here on how I nearly melted away from undertaking fieldwork in the arid drylands of North Senegal.

Something cool
Jane Monheit, The lovers, the dreamers and me, Concord Music Group

The talk of the crop at every county fair

Read about how I uncovered the inconvenient secrets of the maize value chains of mountainous Son La province of Northwest Vietnam here.

Corn star
Craig Morgan, This ole boy, Black river records

Photo: Michelle DeFreese/CIMMYT

Doo-doodlee-doo-doo, it's time for bacon

Read about what I learned on the sustainability of pig value chains in South Vietnam by interviewing a pig farmer, a pig slaughterer and a government official here.

Bacon!
Hoops & Yoyo and Parry Gripp, One donut a day, Oglio

Photo: Kathryn Aaker

When the sun is coming up and you go

I have just been travelling with my parents on a safari around Mount Kenya for eight full days. It was a great opportunity to see lots of wild animals in various natural habitats of Kenya. We went looking for the classic "big five" animals in the arid savanna of Samburu national reserve and saw three of the big fives there: lions, leopards and elephants. We stayed in the all-comfort Elephant Bedroom tented camp along the Ewaso Nyiro river which flows through the park. Apart from the delicious full-course meals served three times a day, my highlight there was watching the wild elephants going through our camp on their way to the river and this young bull who seemed to have found his home there.

During the rest of the trip we were staying in self-catering lodges inside national parks or just outside. This was an opportunity for my father and our guide-driver Douglas Nagi to test my and mother's cooking skills. We also had to plan regular supermarket and market stops along the way to stock up on food; we would then argue on what to buy given our large appetites but limited-sized cool box and the possibility of not finding a fridge or electricity at our destination. (If market sellers in Isiolo and Nanyuki seemed used to foreigners shopping for fresh produce, the small butcher on the road to Meru was quite surprised to see foreigners stop by for 1kg of beef. But he nonetheless chopped a chunk off from the half-cow carcass hanging down in his shop; it went into a bœuf bourguignon stew that evening.)

The 3000m-high Rutundu log cabin up in the moors of Mount Kenya national park had neither electricity nor fridge. But the chilly outside temperatures made a refrigerator unnecessary. Oil-fueled storm lamps and clever solar-powered stand lamps lighted our short evenings. Most of our nighttime was actually spent sleeping. This was a charming change from the usual car-bound hot and dusty African safari experience: invigorating cold mountain weather, steep mountain hiking up to 3500m, keeping warm by the fire place.

Our final stop was in the semi-arid Meru national park where we spotted the last two of our big fives this week: rhinoceroses and Cape buffaloes. Compared with Samburu, the savanna looked very much greener, denser and bushier which made it much more difficult to spot animals.

This trip also allowed me to discover the man-made agricultural landscapes of the country where I now live in. Central Kenya seen from the main road struck me as a succession of smallholder plot agriculture and large-scale farming. Enormous pineapple, coffee and timber tree plantations cover the plateau north of Thika. These are followed by a smallholder-size multi-cropping system which gives a lush green landscape from the plateau of Wamumu up to the steep hills around Nyeri. The staple crop of this system is clearly maize judging by all the maize I saw in the plots along the road. The road stalls and hawkers display the produce of associated market gardening: banana, taro, mango, papaya. Further North, large grazing fields hold dairy cows and other small livestock south of Nanyuki. The Northern slopes of Mount Kenya were the most striking to me with their immense fields of wheat, barley, sunflower and canola; it was not at all a landscape I had expected to find along the Equator in Africa. Roadside stalls and hawkers again showed off the locals' garden produce: potato, carrot, tomato, pepper and other temperate vegetables. The arid scrubland North of Isiolo can only be used as grazing for large herds of livestock tended by colourfully-clad Samburu men and boys. The half-day road trip from arid Samburu to semi-arid Meru was surprising to me because we had to pass through the lush and temperate Nyambeni Hills with more smallholder maize and very green home gardens of fruit trees and vegetables.

There was lots to see along the roads of Central Kenya.

On the road
Keane, Strangeland, Universal-Island Records Ltd

It's gonna take patience and time ... to do it right child

I was invited by my colleague Keith Child (pictured) to facilitate the monitoring, evaluation and learning planning meeting of a large research-for-development program. Read what I took out of it here.

Got my mind set on you
George Harrison, Cloud nine, EMI UK Beatles

I read the news today oh boy

Jo Cadilhon saves himself and 57 other people from death by powerpoint!

Read all about it here!

A day in the life
The Beatles, Sergeant Pepper's lonely hearts club band, EMI

Photo: Nick Quaranto

Où sont les femmes ? Avec leurs gestes pleins de charmes

To learn about my involvement in a dairy value chain assessment study targeting smallholder women in India, read here.

The good thing about interviewing dairy sweet traders is that one gets to sample the goods... We were treated to a cup of custard when we interviewed the owner of this sweet shop in Hyderabad. I then purchased some sweets, just to make it worth the time the owner spent answering our questions about his business.


Où sont les femmes
Patrick Juvet, Paris by night, Decca international

Photo: ILRI/Jo Cadilhon

Tell me more, tell me more, how much dough did he spend?

To learn about the lack of coordination in the farmed fish value chain of Uganda, read here.

Summer nights
John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Soundtrack from the original motion picture Grease, Paramount

Photo: ILRI/Jo Cadilhon

And every mountain and hill made low

Well: it did not feel like it...
Read my impressions from two days of mountain biking in Northwest Vietnam here.

Messiah
G-F Haendel, Howard Crook and The English Concert directed by Trevor Pinnock, Archiv

Photo: Lee Brimelow

In every life we have some trouble

Click here to read about the quintuple whammy of low Internet connectivity, patchy mobile phone service, no accommodation, bad roads and no electricity faced by the actors in the agricultural and food system of the Upper West Region of Ghana. Take a closer look at the photo, then reflect on the resilience these people need to keep doing business.

Don't worry, be happy
Bobby McFerrin, Don't worry be happy, EMI

Photo: zen Sutherland